Top 5 Factors That Increase Cyber Security Salary The Most

Here’s what they found were the most important factors for
making sure you earn as much as possible:

1) Choosing the right type of cybersecurity role and building
your skill set

The cybersecurity role you’re in clearly makes a difference: the
average salary for penetration testers is $55,000 according to U.S.
data from Glassdoor. But cybersecurity engineers should expect to
earn about $140,000—and engineers have a more natural path to
becoming architects, who can earn even more. Cybersecurity analysts
are somewhere in between, averaging about $80,000 a year.

Of course, becoming a cybersecurity engineer requires more
skills and experience than becoming a penetration tester, but you
should know what path you are on.

Building on your cybersecurity skill set and that you’re aiming
for the right role within cybersecurity can make a difference of
tens of thousands of dollars in terms of your annual earnings, so
make sure you’re picking the right role for your skills.

Typically, engineers and architects will require more coding
knowledge and the ability to take their security knowledge and
scale it out through large-scale products.

You have to be ready to design systems rather than simply
testing them. That requires experience, a deliberate foundation in
both security and programming knowledge and systems thinking about
vulnerabilities and threat.

Make sure you’re in the right role and focused on how to advance
to the next one if you want to maximize your earnings. Here, it can
be very helpful to get guidance from somebody working in the
industry or a career coach.

2) Experience

Once you’ve chosen the right role, the years of experience
significantly impact how much you can earn. For example,
entry-level cybersecurity analysts earn on average $8,000 less than
a component of all cybersecurity analysts according to Payscale
data. This curve goes up as your career progresses.

3) Location

Many lucrative cyber security jobs are located in the United
States, where this analysis is focused. You’ll want to get work
eligibility in the United States if you want to take full
advantage: this can be done with employer-sponsored visas or
work/study visas.

Cybersecurity practitioners in certain cities will earn much
more than others, Payscale data shows. In Seattle, a thriving
ecosystem for cybersecurity hires means you’ll earn on average 19
percent more than the national average—the highest average bump
we’ve seen.

You could see 15+ percent increases to your salary if you worked
in New York City or Washington, DC. Where you live and work could
have compounding returns to your cybersecurity career, and even
within America, regional variations and city-by-city differences
can add up to tens of thousands of dollars over the course of a few
years.

4) Certifications

Certifications can bump up your salary quite a bit. Springboard
found using Payscale data, that a CISM certificate can mean a
$25,000 difference in yearly salary between information security
analysts and a CISSP can make a $15,000 difference for information
security analysts.

Across the board, certifications can help boost your yearly
salary by between 5% to 25%—a huge difference if you can compound
that difference across your career. Getting a CISM, CISSP, CISA or
CEH certification can help your cybersecurity career immensely.

5) Portfolio

The amount of work you’ve done in cybersecurity certainly helps you
secure positions with hiring managers. The more you can demonstrate
that you have detected vulnerabilities and worked to address them
in production-level settings, the better.

This can be the first obstacle between somebody and starting a
cyber security career: the chicken and egg problem of needing
cybersecurity experience in order to get a cyber security job.

If you’re interested in making sure you’re on the right path in
your cybersecurity career or looking into practical, personalized
training to advance or start that career and bridge the gap between
theory and career outcomes, look no further than our partner
Springboard’s
Cybersecurity Career Track^[2].

^[1]